Grazing Fees

Joe McCulloch has heroically managed to turn in his regular weekly column on the best-sounding new releases in comics shops, despite an unfortunate lack of dependable internet access. He still won’t tell us where he is, but using a few computer tricks I picked up during an internship for a private investigator, I think I’ve tracked him down to somewhere in rural Nevada. What could he be doing out there?

If Katie Skelly’s Nurse Nurse represented a young artist stretching her limits in her first major work, then her follow-up book, Operation Margarine, sees Skelly working more in her comfort zone. There were times in Nurse Nurse when it seemed that Skelly wasn’t entirely comfortable drawing certain aspects of her Barbarella-inspired space fantasy. She simply didn’t have the chops to convey some aspects of the story, which led to some whiplash narrative shifts. That said, she still followed through and worked around her limitations as best as she could. Cartooning can be seen as a series of problem-solving exercises, and Skelly presented herself with a high degree of difficulty with her first book.